аĿª½±Society Meeting at the 8th European Congress of Mathematics (8ECM) 2021
The lecture is aimed at a general mathematical audience. All interested, whether аĿª½±members or not, are most welcome to attend this event.
This meeting takes place during the from 20-26 June 2021
Programme (timings are in British Summer Time)
4.30pm Opening of the meeting
4.40pm James Maynard (Oxford)
Approximating real numbers by fractions
Abstract: How well can you approximate real numbers by rationals with denominators coming from a given set? Although this old question has applications in many areas, in general this question seems impossibly hard - we don’t even know whether e+pi is rational or not!
If you allow for a tiny number of bad exceptions, then a beautiful dichotomy occurs - either almost everything can be approximated or almost nothing! I’ll talk about this problem and recent joint work with Dimitris Koukoulopoulos which classifies when these options occur, answering an old question of Duffin and Schaeffer. This relies on a fun blend of different ideas, including ergodic theory, analytic number theory and graph theory
Registration: Please register for your place at the 8ECM .